Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—“Had Christ been only human nature, he could not have been without sin. But life can draw out of the putrescent clod materials for its own living. Divine life appropriates the human.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344)—“What with us is regeneration, is with him the incarnation of God.”In this origin of Jesus' sinlessness from his union with God, we see the absurdity, both doctrinally and practically, of speaking of an immaculate conception of the Virgin, and of making her sinlessness precede that of her Son. On the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, see H. B. Smith, System, 389-392; Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 129-131—“It makes the regeneration of humanity begin, not with Christ, but with the Virgin. It breaks his connection with the race. Instead of springing sinless from the sinful race, he derives his humanity from something not like the rest of us.” Thomas Aquinas and Liguori both call Mary the Queen of Mercy, as Jesus her Son is King of Justice; see Thomas, Præf. in Sept. Cath. Ep., Comment on Esther, 5:3, and Liguori, Glories of Mary, 1:80 (Dublin version of 1866). Bradford, Heredity, 289—“The Roman church has almost apotheosized Mary; but it must not be forgotten that the process began with Jesus. From what he was, an inference was drawn concerning what his mother must have been.”
“Christ took human nature in such a way that this nature, without sin, bore the consequences of sin.” That portion of human nature which the Logos took into union with himself was, in the very instant and by the fact of his taking it, purged from all its inherent depravity. But if in Christ there was no sin, or tendency to sin, how could he be tempted? In the same way, we reply, that Adam was tempted. Christ was not omniscient: Mark 13:32—“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Only at the close of the first temptation does Jesus recognize Satan as the adversary of souls: Mat. 4:10—“Get thee hence, Satan.” Jesus could be tempted, not only because he was not omniscient, but also because he had the keenest susceptibility to all the forms of innocent desire. To these desires temptation may appeal. Sin consists, not in these desires, but in the gratification of them out of God's order, and contrary to God's will. Meyer: “Lust is appetite run wild. There is no harm in any natural appetite, considered in itself. But appetite has been spoiled by the Fall.” So Satan appealed (Mat. 4:1-11) to our Lord's desire for food, for applause, for power; to “Ueberglaube, Aberglaude, Unglaube” (Kurtz); cf. Mat. 26:39; 27:42; 26:53. All temptation must be addressed either to desire or fear; so Christ “was in all points tempted like as we are” (Heb. 4:15). The first temptation, in the wilderness, was addressed to desire; the second, in the garden, was addressed to fear. Satan, after the first, “departed from him for a season” (Luke 4:13); but he returned, in Gethsemane—“the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me” (John 14:30)—If possible, to deter Jesus from his work, by rousing within him vast and agonizing fears of the suffering and death that lay before him. Yet, in spite of both the desire and the fear with which his holy soul was moved, he was “without sin”(Heb. 4:15). The tree on the edge of the precipice is fiercely blown by the winds: the [pg 678]strain upon the roots is tremendous, but the roots hold. Even in Gethsemane and on Calvary, Christ never prays for forgiveness, he only imparts it to others. See Ullman, Sinlessness of Jesus; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 2:7-17, 126-136, esp. 135, 136; Schaff, Person of Christ, 51-72; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 3:330-349.
(c) Ideal human nature,—furnishing the moral pattern which man is progressively to realize, although within limitations of knowledge and of activity required by his vocation as the world's Redeemer.
Psalm 8:4-8—“thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet”—a description of the ideal man, which finds its realization only in Christ. Heb. 2:6-10—“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.” 1 Cor. 15:45—“The first ... Adam ... The last Adam”—implies that the second Adam realized the full concept of humanity, which failed to be realized in the first Adam; so verse 49—“as we have borne the image of the earthly [man], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” [man]. 2 Cor. 3:18—“the glory of the Lord” is the pattern, into whose likeness we are to be changed. Phil 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory”; Col. 1:18—“that in all things he might have the pre-eminence”; 1 Pet. 2:21—“suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps”; 1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”
The phrase “Son of man” (John 5:27; cf. Dan. 7:13, Com. of Pusey, in loco, and Westcott, in Bible Com. on John, 32-35) seems to intimate that Christ answers to the perfect idea of humanity, as it at first existed in the mind of God. Not that he was surpassingly beautiful in physical form; for the only way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting intimations is to suppose that in all outward respects he took our average humanity—at one time appearing without form or comeliness (Is. 52:2), and aged before his time (John 8:57—“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), at another time revealing so much of his inward grace and glory that men were attracted and awed (Ps. 45:2—“Thou art fairer than the children of men”; Luke 4:22—“the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth”; Mark 10:32—“Jesus was going before them: and they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid”; Mat. 17:1-8—the account of the transfiguration). Compare the Byzantine pictures of Christ with those of the Italian painters,—the former ascetic and emaciated, the latter types of physical well-being. Modern pictures make Jesus too exclusively a Jew. Yet there is a certain truth in the words of Mozoomdar: “Jesus was an Oriental, and we Orientals understand him. He spoke in figure. We understand him. He was a mystic. You take him literally: you make an Englishman of him.” So Japanese Christians will not swallow the Western system of theology, because they say that this would be depriving the world of the Japanese view of Christ.
But in all spiritual respects Christ was perfect. In him are united all the excellences of both the sexes, of all temperaments and nationalities and characters. He possesses, not simply passive innocence, but positive and absolute holiness, triumphant through temptation. He includes in himself all objects and reasons for affection and worship; so that, in loving him, “love can never love too much.” Christ's human nature, therefore, and not human nature as it is in us, is the true basis of ethics and of theology. This absence of narrow individuality, this ideal, universal manhood, could not have been secured by merely natural laws of propagation,—it was secured by Christ's miraculous conception; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:446 (Syst. Doct., 3:344). John G. Whittier, on the Birmingham philanthropist, Joseph Sturge: “Tender as woman, manliness and meekness In him were so allied, That they who judged him by his strength or weakness Saw but a single side.”
Seth, Ethical Principles, 420—“The secret of the power of the moral Ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is no mere ideal, but the expression of the supreme Reality.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 364—“The a priorionly outlines a possible, and does not determine what shall be actual within the limits of the possible. If experience is to be possible, it must take on certain forms, but those forms are compatible with an infinite variety of experience.” No a priori truths or ideals can guarantee Christianity. We want a historical basis, an actual Christ, a realization of the divine ideal. “Great men,” says Amiel, “are the true men.” Yes, we add, but only Christ, the greatest man, shows what the true man is. The heavenly perfection of Jesus discloses to us the greatness of our own possible being, while at the same time it reveals our infinite shortcoming and the source from which all restoration must come.
Gore, Incarnation, 168—“Jesus Christ is the catholic man. In a sense, all the greatest men have overlapped the boundaries of their time. ‘The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence. They, both in power and act Are permanent, and time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.’ But in a unique sense the manhood of Jesus is catholic; because it is exempt, not from the limitations which belong to manhood, but from the limitations which make our manhood narrow and isolated, merely local or national.” Dale, Ephesians, 42—“Christ is a servant and something more. There is an ease, a freedom, a grace, about his doing the will of God, which can belong only to a Son.... There is nothing constrained ... he was born to it.... He does the will of God as a child does the will of its father, naturally, as a matter of course, almost without thought.... No irreverent familiarity about his communion with the Father, but also no trace of fear, or even of wonder.... Prophets had fallen to the ground when the divine glory was revealed to them, but Christ stands calm and erect. A subject may lose his self-possession in the presence of his prince, but not a son.”
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 148—“What once he had perceived, he thenceforth knew. He had no opinions, no conjectures; we are never told that he forgot, nor even that he remembered, which would imply a degree of forgetting; we are not told that he arrived at truths by the process of reasoning them out; but he reasons them out for others. It is not recorded that he took counsel or formed plans; but he desired, and he purposed, and he did one thing with a view to another.” On Christ, as the ideal man, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 307-336; F. W. Robertson, Sermon on The Glory of the Divine Son, 2nd Series, Sermon XIX; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 22-99; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:25; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 37; Tennyson, Introduction to In Memoriam; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:148-154, and 2:excursus iv; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332; Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ; Hopkins, Scriptural Idea of Man, 121-145; Tyler, in Bib. Sac., 22:51, 620; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:451 sq.
(d) A human nature that found its personality only in union with the divine nature,—in other words, a human nature impersonal, in the sense that it had no personality separate from the divine nature, and prior to its union therewith.